The sentence, like the poetry, requires long puzzling and offers brief rewards.
Kociejowski, an antiquarian bookseller living in England, offers us a short and motley collection of poems centering on the theme of music. Like Borges trolling for inspiration among the special collections of libraries, Kociejowski looks for his subjects in obscure texts and forgotten legends. “Salvatore Guiliano” concerns the adventures of a Sicilian bandit, “The Charterhouse at Valldemosa” recounts the winter spent by George Sand and Frédéric Chopin on Majorca, and “Communiqué for William Hoffer” reflects on a Canadian literary lion who was also “one of the best poets never to have written a verse.” But whereas Borges’s bibliolatry was only a springboard into the ether of metaphysics and religion, Kociejowski seems to enjoy the recherché for its own sake. Most of his poems are thus accompanied by long explanatory endnotes, in which the jocose vies with the pedantic. The wildly disparate subjects of these works are nominally gathered under the cloudy trope of “music.” Chopin figures in two of the long poems, another concerns the songs of a Persian Sufi singer, and “A Pavane for Sydney Housego” describes an old violinist playing for money in a park. The long poem about Chopin and George Sand in Majorca is essentially a prosy piece of biography culled from letters written by Sand with no organizing themes or extended conceits. Yet in the final section Kociejowski will have the final word on Chopin, pulling this limp rabbit from his inch-deep hat: “What music is, his life is: / a prelude that supposes what it is prelude to exists already, / if soundlessly so.”
The sentence, like the poetry, requires long puzzling and offers brief rewards.Pub Date: June 2, 2000
ISBN: 0-85646-318-3
Page Count: 60
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
A fable about the consolatory and strengthening powers of religion flounders about somewhere inside this unconventional coming-of-age tale, which was shortlisted for Canada’s Governor General’s Award. The story is told in retrospect by Piscine Molitor Patel (named for a swimming pool, thereafter fortuitously nicknamed “Pi”), years after he was shipwrecked when his parents, who owned a zoo in India, were attempting to emigrate, with their menagerie, to Canada. During 227 days at sea spent in a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger (mostly with the latter, which had efficiently slaughtered its fellow beasts), Pi found serenity and courage in his faith: a frequently reiterated amalgam of Muslim, Hindu, and Christian beliefs. The story of his later life, education, and mission rounds out, but does not improve upon, the alternately suspenseful and whimsical account of Pi’s ordeal at sea—which offers the best reason for reading this otherwise preachy and somewhat redundant story of his Life.
Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100811-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.
Walker (In Love and Trouble, Meridian) has set herself the task of an epistolary novel—and she scores strongly with it.
The time is in the Thirties; a young, black, Southern woman named Celie is the primary correspondent (God being her usual addressee); and the life described in her letters is one of almost impossible grimness. While young, Celie is raped by a stepfather. (Even worse, she believes him to be her real father.) She's made to bear two children that are then taken away from her. She's married off without her consent to an older man, Albert, who'd rather have Celie's sister Nettie—and, by sacrificing her body to Albert without love or feeling, Celie saves her sister, making it possible for her to escape: soon Nettle goes to Africa to work as a Christian missionary. Eventually, then, halfway through the book, as Celie's sub-literate dialect letters to God continue to mount (eventually achieving the naturalness and intensity of music, equal in beauty to Eudora Welty's early dialect stories), letters from Nettie in Africa begin to arrive. But Celie doesn't see them—because Albert holds them back from her. And it's only when Celie finds an unlikely redeemer—Albert's blues-singer lover Shug Avery—that her isolation ends: Shug takes Celie under her wing, becomes Celie's lover as well as Albert's; Shug's strength and expansiveness and wisdom finally free up Nettie's letters—thus granting poor Celie a tangible life in the now (Shug's love, encouragement) as well as a family life, a past (Nettie's letters). Walker fashions this book beautifully—with each of Celie's letters slowly adding to her independence (the implicit feminism won't surprise Walker's readers), with each letter deepening the rich, almost folk-tale-ish sense of story here. And, like an inverted pyramid, the novel thus builds itself up broadeningly while balanced on the frailest imaginable single point: the indestructibility—and battered-ness—of love.
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.Pub Date: June 28, 1982
ISBN: 0151191549
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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